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There’s a cognitive shortcut we humans all seem to fall into using — culture? human nature? — that runs something like this:

- There are good guys and bad guys; this is characteristic of a person, not an action.

- Nations are people, and as such are possessed of a single mind, personality, and moral status.

Both of these shortcuts are false, but we lean on them.

1/

These shortcuts serve us especially poorly right now wrt Israel and Palestine. In particular, they obscure the straightforward truth:

Antisemitism is on the rise. It has horrific historical precedent. Everyone deserves protection from such horrors. Hamas committed such horrors in October. The Likud government is currently committing such horrors, at massive scale.

No contradiction there. But if you think nations are people and people are either good guys or bad guys, it’s incomprehensible.

2/

These shortcuts also obscure a subtler point I keep making:

We should view Likud and Hamas as •allies• inasmuch as these are both groups united by a genocidal goal, and both need every path to peace off the table in pursuit of that goal. Both parties need atrocities to justify atrocities. Atrocities by either group thus work in favor of the interests of both.

Keep that in mind. Nations aren’t people. Factions and coalitions can cross national boundaries.

/end

@inthehands this is a really ignorant take that ignores historical context and what these groups are literally saying.

Israelis in positions of power are committing genocide and unabashedly saying so (one of countless examples: huffpost.com/entry/israeli-off)

Hamas lacks the capacity and has stated very different goals

This is not remotely a defense of certain Hamas members killing civilians or taking civilian hostages. But their intention for the latter was to free Palestinian prisoners (not to eradicate a religious / ethnic group).

You are completely flattening context and the number of desperate Palestinians who join Hamas because it is the most well-established resistance faction. There is not uniformity in values there (unlike Netanyahu's regime which is ruthlessly unified in wiping out Palestinians and expanding Israeli displacement of the indigenous people).

You don't have to agree with Hamas leadership to avoid making baseless comparisons that misrepresent reality.

HuffPost · Israeli Official Suggests Gaza Be ‘Flattened Completely, Just Like Auschwitz Today’By Sanjana Karanth
Paul Cantrell

@AnarchoDoggo Yes, multiple Israeli officials in the current government have explicitly stated genocidal intent.

So have Hamas officials. This was not a difficult web search: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calls_fo

I don’t know why you’re trying to put this asterisk next to Hamas. It doesn’t hold up, except through the lens of Hamas’s own PR. But see what you want to see, I guess.

en.wikipedia.orgCalls for the destruction of Israel - Wikipedia

@inthehands advocating for the end to a settler colonial empire is not the same as calling for the eradication of its people.

I want to see the United States no longer exist. Does that make me a terrorist? Or just ideologically consistent about decolonization. Again this is not me broadly agreeing with their ideology or certain tactics but absolutely nothing is shocking about Palestinians not wanting Israel to exist. Israel exists because of the Nakba and 75 years of apartheid, occupation, mass displacement, and brutality against Palestinians.

There are plenty of valid critiques to make about Hamas; you've just landed on the wrong ones. There is a reason why media and governmental officials work so hard to decontextualize and strip away the nuance.

Hamas has become the catch-all boogeyman for militant Palestinian resistance. When that resistance is far more varied and even Hamas is broadly mischaracterized